Since the 1970s, identity discourse among Chinese evangelicals in
North America has focused on urging immigrant church leaders to accept
their socialization into North American culture and to share power and
resources more equitably. During the NACOCE conferences in 1972, 1974, and 1978, advocates for North American–born Chinese pressed for
greater attention. In 1978, a small group of West Coast American-born
pastors received endorsements from NACOCE to form the Fellowship of
American Chinese Evangelicals (FACE). This group sought to address the
perceived problem of a high “drop out” rate among American-born
Chinese (ABC) in Chinese churches, cultivate ABC church leadership,
advocate for ABC ministries within Chinese churches, and support ABC
laity toward “responsible leadership in the church.” In April 1979, they
started publication of the AboutFACE newsletter. AboutFACE has—
surprisingly for evangelicals—not devoted much attention to biblical
interpretation or theological reflections upon ABC evangelical experience.
But its goals were clear. It usually addressed one or two ABC evangelical
issues, included some amateur sociological, psychological, or cultural
analyses, and provided lots of practical suggestions for those involved
with ministry among American-born Chinese evangelicals. Over the
years, it has also served as a communication tool for ABC evangelical
clergy and laity.

Interestingly, the first biblical passage to be highlighted was Acts 15
(AboutFACE, Aug. 1979). Wayland Wong suggested that ABCs drop out of
Chinese churches because the Christian gospel was not contextualized
enough for them to own the faith. Pointing to the difficulty that “Jewish
Christians” had in accepting “Greek Christians,” Wong argued that the
Asian culture within Chinese congregations, much like the Jewish Christians,
has become a stumbling block for the American-born to fully
participate in the life of the church. “For many ABCs, fitting into a transplanted
Chinese church from Asia appears to be too great a hurdle,” Wong
asserts. Thus, the solution “is not to make the children of the Chinese
church culturally more Chinese in order to reach them. This is like the Jews
requiring the Greeks to be more Jewish in order to become good Christians.”
Rather, the Chinese church must make the gospel contextually
relevant to each new culture it reaches—namely, the American-born Chinese.
This is equivalent to Paul and the Jerusalem Council’s decision to
embrace Gentiles without requiring circumcision. Wong concludes with a
call for an “indigenous ministry” where “radical changes and creative innovations
must take place.”

A few issues later (AboutFACE, Nov. 1979), Hoover Wong appropriated
Acts 6:1–7 and referred to the same cultural tensions between Hellenist and
Hebrew-speaking Jewish Christians. Claiming that “FACE took its roots”
from this passage, H. Wong drew clear parallels between the Hellenists
and the American-born Chinese while identifying the Hebrews with the
Chinese-speaking and overseas-born. In order to resolve the contemporary
crisis, Chinese church leaders must empower the English-speaking to exercise
their gifts for ministry.

AboutFACE’s challenge to the Chinese church in North America stirred
up much discussion and some controversy in the early 1980s. Most theologically
trained immigrant Chinese (or overseas-born Chinese [OBC])
evangelicals expressed sympathy for the American-born. They agreed that
Chinese cultural identity should not be viewed as a fixed reality, since it had
undergone many changes over time and in different cultural contexts.
Rather, one’s North American Chinese identity falls along a wide continuum
from the least to the most assimilated. Furthermore, they asserted that
one’s identity moved back and forth along this continuum, depending on
the contexts and length of time spent in North America. In spite of these
pleas for reconciliation and unity, the real issue for AboutFACE editors was to
persuade the congregations dominated by Chinese-speaking and overseasborn
leaders to provide resources for ministries relevant to ABCs, and to
share power more equitably. While the irenic OBC scholars were content to
describe cultural identity issues of the American-born to help Chinesespeaking
and overseas-born evangelicals better understand their children,
ABC leaders viewed identity discourse as a means to achieve their desire for
greater power and recognition in church congregations (Tan; Law; Ling).